Shooting at targets instead of each
other, former government soldiers and
guerrillas train together for the civilian
controlled national police. An FBI agent
from Puerto Rico leads practice. In war
time the military ran the police, widely
viewed as murderous enforcers.
La d "My whole family farmed,
LandU but we didn't own land,"
Sim6n Amaya said. "We rented a little piece to
grow our corn. But to get any money, we had
to migrate to pick coffee or cotton."
Land. "I was born learning to work land
that's all I know," said Serafin Chavez,
Sim6n's companero, his buddy.
In El Salvador the inequity of landowner
ship was one of the main causes of the civil war
that flared in 1980 and lasted a dozen years. A
yawning economic fault allotted great estates
to a handful of landlords while tens of thou
sands of campesino families had not a clod.
So there is unaccustomed pride of posses
sion today in parts of El Salvador, such as the
sandy plain that delivers the Rio Lempa to the
Pacific Ocean. Guerrillas once, Sim6n and
Serafin are landowners there, with about five
acres apiece. Not a lot, but many campesinos
survive on less.
"Anybody who suffered
through 12 years of war would be happy with
anything," said Sim6n, a guerrilla at 17.
The smallest and most densely packed
nation on the New World mainland
Massachusetts-size and nearly as populous,
burgeoning with 5.9 million souls-El Salva
dor, the land of the Savior, is more familiar
with suffering than salvation. Besides peri
odic social upheavals-the recent war and a
land-related rebellion in 1932 that resulted
in the slaughter of thousands of Indians-it
endures a geologic curse. Volcano-studded, it
trembles often, sometimes devastatingly. This
explains why the capital, San Salvador, is a
modern, mostly low-slung city, its Spanish
era architecture having toppled long ago.
A frequent GEOGRAPHIC contributor, photographer
TOMASZ TOMASZEWSKI lives in Warsaw, Poland.
112
But no event has been as potentially earth
shaking as that of January 1992, when the
Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front
(FMLN) and the government signed a peace
pact with far-reaching accords. Both sides
were weary and found their allies also flag
ging. After spending an estimated six billion
dollars to bolster the government and the
army, the United States wanted out; at the
same time, the communist regimes that nour
ished the guerrillas were collapsing.
The UN brokered the peace negotiations
and sent human rights lawyers, police, and
other observers to monitor implementation of
the accords. These halved the army to 30,000
men and, if faithfully observed, will end
National Geographic, September 1995